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The Museum’s Collections document the fate of Holocaust victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others through artifacts, documents, photos, films, books, personal stories, and more. Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center.

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors conducted the interview with Martin Water on April 13, 1983, in Washington, D.C., during the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors Conference. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Dept. received the tape of the interview in 1989. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the tape by transfer in February 1995.

Record last modified: 2018-01-22 11:05:03
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn503501

Also in American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors oral history collection

Contains oral history interviews with 157 Holocaust survivors recorded during the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington, D.C., in Apr. 1983. The interviews contain information about persecution, life in the ghettos and concentration camps, and concentration camp liberation during World War II.

Suzanne Agasee, born in Paris, France on January 12, 1939, describes police coming to her home when she was two and taking her parents, leaving her grandmother, two brothers, and herself behind; a Jewish woman from an underground organization coming the next day to hide them; her grandmother being caught, deported, and dying in a gas chamber; being sent with her brothers to live with Catholic families; being taken to a Jewish orphanage after the war and living there for three years; searching for living relatives; she and her brothers becoming wards of the Jewish Congress and being sent to Canada to live with an uncle; being an atheist for years; marring a Jewish man; and deciding with her husband that having a strong Jewish identity was important in raising their two daughters.

Janet Applefield, born Gustava Singer in June 1935 in Kraków, Poland, discusses her family; being sent with her mother to Wadowice, Poland when the war began; her father joining them and moving to Vynnyky, Ukraine, where they lived for several months; her family returning to the Nowy Targ ghetto; leaving the ghetto with her parents and going to Niepolomice, Poland; how her parents decided to give her away to a half Polish, half German woman; her parents deportation the next day; staying with a cousin under the name Christina Antoskevitch; her cousin’s arrest by Nazis during a raid; not know what had happened to her cousin; a soldier refusing to help her; how a Polish woman took care of her for several weeks and then sent her to her family’s farm; staying on the farm; returning to another cousin after the war; being treated in a home in Zakopane, Poland for jaundice; reuniting with her father; immigrating with her father to the United States on March 25, 1947; and marrying and having three children.

The interview describes Ms. Neufeld's childhood in Berlin, Germany, her father's escape to Paris, France where she joined him and they lived until 1942, her father's arrest, and her move to a series of French orphanges. Ms. Neufeld describes an incident in which she was taken by the director of an orphange to see her mother, who had been transported to a prison in Paris from Berlin, where she had been hidden. Ms. Neufeld discusses the disappearance of the director of the orphange, escaping to northern France with other children from the orphange, and remembers air fights and struggling to survive in the countryside. Ms. Neuberg describes her life after the war, being sent for by relatives in the United States, and learning that both her parents perished in Auschwitz.

Simon Taitz, born in Königsberg, Germany, describes having a successful watchmaking business in the suburbs of Kaunas, Lithuania; hiding with a Gentile family after the German invasion; being in a motorcycle club before the war began and how it was taken by the partisans; being forced to do labor; being mistreated by the Germans; being sent to the ghetto; working in the nearby airport; being sent one day to another work place and writing a song (he sings it during the interview); witnessing the reactions of the parents during and after the roundup of Jewish children; the separation of the men and women in a camp and writing a song about a woman who saw the men dancing and was punished (he sings it and the interviewee reads the translation); his song about the daily life in the camp (he sings it and the interviewee reads the translation); more details about life in the ghetto; writing a song about the choices people made during the war; the journey on cattle cars to Dachau; being sent originally to Stutthof; being transferred to Dachau, where he was separated from his mother and never saw her again; details on his childhood (losing his father when he was very young and having two siblings); helping to save other Jews in the camp by giving them jobs in his watchmaking repair shop in Kaufering; and more details on daily life in the camps.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.